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Creation Ex Nihilo

I’ve been reflecting on David Fergusson’s recent book Creation the last couple of weeks. These reflections don’t aspire to be careful reviews of the book. Rather, I’m reading a chapter per week and writing something related to the topics covered in that chapter. Today’s is probably better described as a reflection “inspired by” Fergusson’s chapter (think of the difference between a movie that is based on a true story versus one that is inspired by a true story).

Some atheist scientists wanted to show church people that they no longer needed any supernatural component to explain things in the world. So they got an audience with the pope to demonstrate that they could form a human being out of dirt just like God supposedly did. The pope was interested enough to see their demonstration, so the scientists set up the contraption that would sort out the chemical elements from the dirt and recombine them into a human being. Just as they were scooping up some dirt to put into the hopper, a booming voice from the sky said, “Hold on a minute… get your own dirt.”

There are lots of variations of that old joke, and I’m not sure how funny it is, but it illustrates the point that any creative work we might attempt today begins with some material already. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo says that God had no such pre-existents to work with.

Most of us have intuitions that you can’t get from nothing to something via strictly natural explanations. Lately it has been scientifically fashionable to challenge that intuition. Just last week a story got some attention which claimed “Physicists proved God didn’t create the universe”, arguing the same sort of thing that Lawrence Krauss did in his 2012 book, A Universe from Nothing. But both of these suffer from having a “nothing” that is fairly well endowed. This NYT review of Krauss has been the go-to philosophical take-down of the position that scientists have explained how to get something from nothing.

I think it is more honest and forthright to go the route that atheist cosmologist Sean Carroll did in an article he wrote for my Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity called, “Does the Universe Need God?” Considering our desire for an ultimate account that explains why this universe came into existence he says,

The ultimate answer to “We need to understand why the universe exists / continues to exist / exhibits regularities / came to be” is essentially “No, we don’t”. . . It is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case. Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is.” (p. 193)

We Christians say there must be something eternal and uncreated to explain why the universe exists; Carroll and others say, “the universe just is.” Of course that’s getting dangerously close to investing the natural world with qualities traditionally reserved for the divine (the Great “I Am”). They say, “you have your god that is eternal and uncreated; we’re just skipping a step and saying the universe itself fills that role.” The problem is that matter and usable energy are not eternal and uncreated. Eternality and uncreatedness have to inhere in a completely different kind of being. And that is the real work that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilio attempts to do. It is not just saying that there was no matter for God to work from, it is articulating how radically different (philosophers say “ontologically different”) God is from the kinds of things we find in the universe today.

My reflection so far has been related to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo only insofar as the natural order needed a spark to get it started. This is one version of the cosmological argument (usually called the Kalam argument), but by itself it could be used to support deism just as much as Christian theism. Classical Christian authors were more concerned with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as an expression of the otherness of God and creation’s continued dependence on God. Let’s see what that looks like in a familiar section of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

The first of Aquinas’s “Five Ways” that show the necessity of God is generally called the Argument from Motion. That may sound as though he argues that since some things are in motion, something else had to put them in motion, and ultimately there will have to be a First Mover, which is God. But that is only superficially correct about Aquinas, who is much more subtle than that. He uses the Latin word motu which can mean “motion” or “change”, and he clearly has in mind the second more comprehensive meaning, because the example he gives is a piece of wood that grows hotter because of fire. He observes that when things change, they become what they previously were not, and he argues that the only way that could happen is if there is something else which makes possible the new reality. So don’t think of his argument in a mechanistic and temporal, billiard ball way that says something had to get all this started. What Aquinas has in mind is more along the lines of understanding the motion of the billiard ball because of the existence of the game of billiards. The motion and existence of the billiard ball depends on the fact that there is a game of billiards. And then the existence of the game of billiards depends on something else, namely the people who created and play the game. And so the hierarchy of being continues with things that only have derivative being, until there is something that has Being in itself, not derived from any other source. That thing is God—the ultimate ground of all change and existence. And so all things depend on God for their existence.

So, creatio ex nihilo asserts a radical distinction between created things, which depend on God for their very existence, and God himself, who does not depend on anything else. If God had created the world out of pre-existing stuff, that dependence relationship would be murkier. In addition to starting this off, ex nihilo is clear that all created things ultimately depend on God for their continued existence.

Fergusson says that creatio ex nihilo’s clear distinction in the status of created things from the Uncreated brings with it the implication that “it belongs not to theology but to natural science to discover how the world works” (p. 20). The world is not divine, and the tools for learning about it are what we today call “science”. I think this is a really important implication of creatio ex nihilo, and one that is not often noted. It would take us off in the direction of methodological naturalism to explore it further here. The relevance to this post is this: A commitment to explaining the workings of the created order through natural means does not at all suggest that the natural world exists independently of God and God’s providence, or that God merely wound it up and let it go on its own. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo states the opposite: created things are utterly dependent on God.

In Fergusson’s next chapter, he grapples with the doctrine of the Fall. I’ll see you then.

References & Credits

Update: the sentence "The problem is that matter and usable energy are not eternal and uncreated" was changed from an earlier version than clearly ran afoul of the Law of the Conservation of Energy. Thanks to a Redditor at r/Christianity for pointing it out.

About the Author

Jim Stump is Senior Editor at BioLogos. As such he oversees the development of new content and curates existing content for the website and print materials. Jim has a PhD in philosophy from Boston University and was formerly a philosophy professor and academic administrator. He has authored Science and Christianity: An Introduction to the Issues (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and edited Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan 2017). Other books he has co-authored or co-edited include: Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction (Routledge, 2010, 2016), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), How I Changed My Mind About Evolution (InterVarsity, 2016), and Old Earth or Evolutionary Creation: Discussing Origins with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos (InterVarsity, 2017).

"What kind of evidence would somebody need to have in order to be rationally compelled to say that an event was a miracle? That person would have to know that this event could not possibly be explained by future science. But not only is such a belief unwarranted, it’s also bad for future science to believe it."

These provocative words are written by Princeton philosopher Hans Halvorson (a Christian), in an article that itself provoked some good discussion when we posted it last week.

Check out the full article (link in comments), and then respond to the quote above. Does calling something a "miracle" put it in danger of being debunked by future scientific advances? Is there a different way of thinking about the concept of a miracle, that might satisfy his concerns? Feel free to discuss below. ... See moreSee less

Hard for me to see that the Incarnation is not a miracle. For others , God could be working on a quantum level?? But does the latter fall into”God of the Gaps?”

5 hours ago · 1

Amen🌀 Jesus doesn't care about Alabama Crimson Tide 🏈 football. Instead, He loves 🌀 Spring and the start of ⚾ baseball season. That's why He started His own story, "In the Big inning..." Just watch 🌀 His wind-up! You need to start reading your 📖 Bible!

3 hours ago

One thing for sure, it is more a philosophical question than a religious one.

7 hours ago · 2

Great article. In answer to you question about a different way of thinking about miracles that would "satisfy his concern", to me it would make sense to explain a miracle in terms of something that everyone (religious and non-religious alike) would have no explanation for, given our current understanding of science.

Science will never describe the full expanse of reality. Science is not geared to that end. This is basic knowledge.
Reason is the handmaiden of faith because faith takes us where reason cannot go. As such, the only thing that will ever describe the fill expanse of reality is faith supernaturally given by God, i.e. God graciously enlightening the intellect. Reason gives way to faith because reason is limited in its capacity to describe reality.
This is not to say reason is not essential. It is the handmaiden of faith because it is a true and good servant to faith. As such faith and reason never contradict, but faith does transcend reason.

10 hours ago · 5

I'm tired of these types of questions constantly being proposed. It was not a scientist who discovered that dead human beings do not rise from the dead (which is different than Jesus resurrection) it was simple human experience. Therefore, the question is rather silly to ask. My first reply is to ask: who cares if Jesus resurrection contradicts science? My second reply is to make the observation that this question is phrased in such a way that science is presupposed as the final arbiter of truth claims like the resurrection of Jesus. Thirdly, how exactly could scientists study the resurrection of Jesus? Scripture tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead. Can science study this claim? Fourth, it would be one thing to subject the resurrection to some sort of scientific investigation ( I know not what or how) and a completely different thing to study what the resurrection of Jesus means for me or you personally. It seems Biologos is in need of some good theologians and philosophers to add to this conversation. Finally, this question smacks of a form of Evidentialism that would make faith subject to the vagarities of evidence. In the end I have to affirm that it matters little to me if the resurrection of Jesus did contradict science. On another note, one could ask: whose "science" and which scientists?

3 hours ago · 1

Exactly so.

11 hours ago · 1

Mmmmmm, I would say that a resurrection is contradictory to observed evidence, but that's fine. A God that is truly supernatural would act supernaturally at times. Although, I suppose God could whip up a truly natural Star Trek hypospray to overcome the decay process and relaunch the body's systems.